Technical equipment that is part of a facility can create potential health risks to persons in that facility or to persons outside the facility. Examples of facilities include plants, factory sites, production facilities, robot cells, workshops, repair shops, computer server farms, hospitals, streets, railway stations, bus terminals, airports and the like. Examples of technical equipment include industrial or agricultural machines, power systems and products (such as transformers, power electronics, industrial robots, drives, generators, motors) measurement products or instruments (such as flow meters), road or rail vehicles, aircraft, transportation means or other physical objects. The technical equipment can cause health risks, for example, by emitting dust, particles, radiation, toxic gases, by heating the environment to extreme cold or hot temperatures, by causing mechanical hazards or otherwise.
Risks are not only directed to persons, but the technical equipment can be at risk itself (damage, destruction, etc.). Also, persons can be a risk to the equipment. In view of that, a terminology differentiation such as into “safety risk” (e.g., to persons) and “security risk” (e.g., from persons) is not required. Risks are omnipresent.
Rules mitigate the risks, for example, by limiting or preventing physical access of persons to the equipment (or to the facility), by demanding warning signs to be displayed, by requiring the persons to wear protective garments, or the like.
In many cases, the facility operators and the persons inside the facility are in an employer-employee relation, for example, in case of factories. In other cases, the facility operators have to deal with persons that belong to the general public, for example, in case of railway stations or airports.
For the mentioned reasons and also for legal reasons, facility operators have to manage the risks. The facility operators set up rules and communicate the rules to the persons in the facility. The facility operators monitor the facility in view of the rules on a regular basis, record compliance and/or non-compliance with the rules, and process the records. Also, the facility operators identify and conduct counter-measures that lead to rule compliance.
For monitoring and recording, the facility operators can use microphones, gas sensors or cameras that are installed in the facility, or the facility operators can dispatch human specialists, so-called inspectors (or auditors, or safety/security experts) to the facilities.
The inspectors monitor the facility in person and record the results on paper in notebooks or questionnaires. The inspectors seek improvements when making the records on portable computers. In such scenarios, media breaks between recording and processing can be avoided. However, for both the paper and the computer approach, record processing is separated by location (facility vs. office) and time (processing time later than recording time). But just replacing paper by portable computers can cause constraints at the technical level. For example, the computer needs user interfaces, the computer communicates data over channels with limited bandwidth, and the computer itself is in constant demand for electrical energy.